We have Scanmate F10 and F14 scanners. The F10 is dongle free but the F14 has a dongle attached to Lpt1. We have been using them on Win2000 and latterly Win XP for the past 10+ years, but we are now moving over to Windows 7 64bit for all our PCs.

The software that runs them is called Color Quartet which in now 10 years old and will not be updated as the company are no longer trading. We have installed Color Quartet on Win 7 but the unsharp mask function will not pick up our custom unsharp masking settings.

My question is... Does anyone have any experience of using these scanners on Win7, and if so have you been able to get full functionality in the software?And my next obvious question... How did you do it?

If you bought the "Ultimate" license level of Windows 7, you'd get access to the built-in Windows XP virtual machine. You could run your older software under that without any problem, as just another window inside Windows 7.

Of course, you'd still be using XP, but it would work, and you wouldn't need another computer to do it. So far, I've never found an XP app that I couldn't get to run under the W7 XP VM.

Many thanks for your replies.I have tried compatibility mode settings and I have installed Windows XP virtual machine I have Windows 7 professional.Unfortunately the compatibility mode settings did not work. The Virtual XP is extremely slow and unresponsive, so slow as to be unusable, but the software had its full functionality.Has anyone tried the Microsoft compatibility toolkit to get software to run correctly? Our IT dep. seem reluctant to try this.I have also heard of copying all the registration entries relating to the software from an XP machine over to the Win 7 machine, which to me sounds very risky, but has any one tried this?

The Virtual XP option available in Windows 7 is much slower than any of the other virtualisation tools mentioned. As long as you have a reasonable spec'ed host (4GB or more RAM), you should find the XP guest performance through VMware Workstation / Player or VirtualBox much better.

We have managed to get the scanners working with Windows 7 32bit. This is because the adaptec scsi aw2940 card that it operates through only has drivers for 32bit. I then looked into the registry to find out where the software was expecting to find the resources folder. I then placed that folder there. Hey presto everything works as it should.